Midnight Solitaire (14 page)

Luke crawls to the opening, gets up on his knees and fires the .38 into the night, squeezing off four rounds before falling back behind the closest booth.

More shots ring out in the night, the shooter invisible in the storm but the results of his attack appearing as pops and little explosions across the diner each time a round hits.

Kit and Greer crawl behind the counter as Doc, still lying flat on the floor, inches his way toward his shotgun, which he left a few feet away. Once he’s got it he rolls over onto his back, swings his legs around and braces the butt of the shotgun on his upper thigh, pumps and fires out through the door into the night.

The moment the shots cease, Doc calls out to the others. “Is everyone all right?”

Kit and Greer answer yes, and Luke responds with, “We should’ve never come back here. We’re trapped here too. I only got a couple rounds left.”

“We need to block the door.” Doc gets to his knees and squints, doing his best to see in the dark. At the far end of the diner are some old tables and chairs stacked atop one another and thrown into a pile. Better than nothing. “Greer and Kit, help me with the door. Stay low. Luke!” He tosses him the shotgun.

In one fluid motion, Luke catches it and spins toward the door, watching the night and ready to fire if need be.

Greer and Kit join Doc, and together they scurry over to the pile of discarded furniture. The tables are largest and heaviest, so they pull down two of them and slide them across the floor to the doorway. Doc tips the first and they throw the second on top. After two more trips, two tables and several chairs fill the doorway, the pile nearly halfway up the doorframe. Snow continues to blow in through the open space up top, and in the time it took to move the furniture the first several feet of floor just inside the diner are covered with a layer of snow. Unfortunately the makeshift blockade does little to slow the wind, and the temperature inside the diner continues to plummet.

Without warning the thunderous shots return and the diner windows begin blowing out one by one, shattering and spraying the dining room as everyone dives for cover.

Then abruptly as they began, the shots cease, and there is only the storm, the wind and the cold.

After a moment everyone begins to move, to inspect themselves and make sure they’re all right. Luke hurries to a booth, slides onto the bench and peeks out through the now open space that had been a window. He looks back, tosses the shotgun to Doc. “If he has all this power why is he fucking around with this bullshit? Why doesn’t he just rush us like he did back at the office?”

“He’s not indestructible,” Doc manages, crawling toward the counter. Once there he sits down with his back against it and begins reloading his shotgun. “He’s trapped in human form. The body will withstand more than most normal people would but if he stays in a wounded host too long the body will die or become useless like any other.”

“And then he jumps to someone else?” Greer asks. “A new host?”

“It’s not that easy. It’s not like the movies where a demon just slides in and out of people at will. He has to be allowed in. He’s already searching for a new place to hide, trust me.”

Kit removes her eyeglasses, quickly wipes them off. “Inside one of us?”

“That’s why if you hear him talking to you, don’t listen.”

Hands to her head, Greer grimaces not in pain but horror. “But I did hear him. Before, whispering through the vent, he—”

“Like I told you, ignore it. Think about something else. Pray. Whatever works, just don’t listen. Don’t engage it. Fight it. Resist.”

“OK.” Greer nods, draws a deep breath and tries to put on a strong face, but it’s obvious she’s just barely clinging to control. “OK.”

“Snow’s coming in fast,” Luke says. “And the temperature’s dropping. We stay here we’ll freeze to death.”

“You wanted to fight and make a stand.” Doc racks the shotgun. “Well here it is.”

“Yeah but if he’s going to play games and try to wait and freeze us out then we need make a move now. We need to go get the bastard.”

“He has to come to us.”

“Maybe he’s too smart for that.”

“Maybe he is. We’ll find out.”

Luke looks back. “So we sit and wait? Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“He don’t get us,” Luke mumbles, “the storm will.”

“I think I’d rather take my chances in the storm,” Greer says.

Kit hugs herself against the cold. “Luke might have a point. We can’t just huddle here indefinitely. Sooner or later we will freeze to death, and in these temperatures I think we’re talking a few hours at most.”

“Quiet,” Luke says, inching closer to the jagged bottom of the window. “I just saw him moving around out there. Something…I…saw something moving in the snow, it...”

Through the whiteout, a figure slips free, moving between the flakes with an odd gait. Luke squints, watching, unable to look away now, rising higher on his knees in the booth for a better view. It’s not possible and yet…there it is.

“What is it?” Greer presses.

“Can’t,” Luke mutters, “can’t be, it…can’t.”

But it is, Luke. It is real and right here in front of you. Look and see for yourself, lamb. This is the future I can give you. You can have it all back again, and this time it can be right, just the way you’ve always imagined it. You and Rachel and the child you’ve always wanted.

Skipping…the figure is a child and she’s…she’s skipping…

Emotion wells in him the likes of which he has never before known. Somewhere between rage and sorrow, he rises up and levels the .38 out at the storm and the lies coming toward him.

“Luke, get down!” Doc screams. “Get down, don’t look, he’s—”

A daughter, Luke, a beautiful baby girl…

As the phantom child vanishes in the flakes, Luke can see and hear only Rachel and the life he let slip through his fingers, the life he wasted. The gun is heavy in his hand, too heavy suddenly, and like in a dream where everything looks and feels as if one has stumbled into a funhouse hall of mirrors, where all is distorted and dizzy and illusory, he cannot lift it or fire it or even focus his eyes on the world around him.

“Rachel?” he whispers. “Baby?”

Come to me, lamb, everything will be all right if you just come to me.

Doc crawls across the floor toward the booth fast as he can.

He’s too late.

Just above the howling wind comes the swooshing sound of velocity followed by the thump of impact.

Something bursts from the center of Luke’s back, effortlessly ripping through him and the raincoat, protruding like an impossibly long accusatory finger.

Doc stops short, stays low. There is nothing he can do now, and he knows it. Somewhere behind him in the dark, Greer gasps and cries out and Kit says something too, and although he can hear them, their words are garbled and lost in the madness and fear, the helplessness.

Slowly, Luke turns to face the others. Still on his knees on the booth bench, he steadies himself with his free hand against the table, eyes wide with disbelief and shock, mouth open but silent. The arrow has gone clear through him, the aluminum shaft glistening against the snowflakes. He looks straight ahead but sees nothing more of this world. He’s already trudging toward the next, focused on things the others can neither see nor understand.

Someone screams “No!” and there is crying. Someone pleads for Doc to somehow help him.

But no one moves.

Another arrow bursts out through the base of Luke’s throat like a special effect in a horror movie. His body bucks but remains upright, and he makes a soft guttural sound that emanates from deep inside him.

Doc lunges forward onto one knee, the shotgun aimed at the window.

The .38 slips from Luke’s grasp, hits the table and falls to the floor as a third arrow explodes through his chest. This time he gasps and grunts, and a ribbon of dark blood sprays from his mouth, arcs in the air and splashes the booth.

Wind slams the diner, and as Luke’s eyes roll back to white, he finally falls. Backwards. Tumbling out through the window, his body momentarily snags on the jagged remnants of glass along the bottom of the frame before sliding out and away into the storm with a horrifying ripping sound.

Doc pops up to his feet and fires repeatedly into the night, unable to see anything beyond the furious snowfall but continuing until the shotgun is empty. As he drops back down and begins to reload, a shadow glides by him.

It isn’t until she’s scooped up the .38 and with a primal scream fired the last two shots at the storm that he realizes it is Greer.

The gun clicks empty, but she keeps pulling the trigger.

Doc reaches up, grabs the waistband of her jeans and yanks her down to the floor with him. Kit scrambles closer, and the three wait.

The fury of the storm rages on, offering nothing, its secrets hidden in darkness and blood.

SEVENTEEN

As The Dealer drags Luke’s body back across the lot by the ankles, he focuses not on the kill or the rituals that must follow, but the tranquility inside the storm, where there is no wind or snow or sleet, no blood or violence, only the final, quiet stillness of the grave. What came before, and what follows, are not yet relevant. Within the storm there is a silence the others can never know. He feels it prickling through him like electrical current, but this strange and beautiful silence does not come to those who hear it. Only those who come to it can hear and feel its power and splendor, those who know and understand the quiet that follows a human kill. They alone can truly comprehend that unique stitch in time where hunter and fallen prey exist together in symbiotic clarity, draped in the cloak of transference, where struggle becomes acceptance, panic becomes peace, light becomes darkness and life becomes death.

There is poetry in evil.

Back around the side of the motel office building, he releases Luke’s legs and crouches down next to the knapsack he left there. Putting his crossbow aside, he retrieves his scalpel from the knapsack and begins removing the man’s lips, slicing them free at the ends then peeling them back as he slides the blade beneath and works it back and forth in a sideways sawing motion, deeper and across the kill’s mouth. He takes the top lip, then the bottom. It leaves Luke’s face looking ghoulish and inhuman, as if his dead eyes staring into eternity and his body pierced with arrows wasn’t enough. Holding them in the palm of his bloody hand, The Dealer gently presses the lips to his own and begins to pray.

A while later, when he’s finished, The Dealer returns to the office. There, he removes his deck of cards from his coat pocket and places them on the front desk. After tossing his hat aside, he looks over the knit hat he took from Luke’s body. It can be worn as either a regular hat or pulled down as a full ski mask. The Dealer chooses the later, placing the hat on his head then slowly stretching it down across his face until the mouth and eyeholes match up. He likes this. It reminds him of an executioner’s hood.

The cards whisper to him. What he’d really like to do is sit and ride the storm out in one of the rooms with a bottle of vodka and his deck. The others will be dead by morning anyway, what difference does it make? He could easily simply let them freeze to death, but just like The Dealer, the one hunting him has a destiny. And destiny will not be ignored. It is beyond good or evil.

The Dealer touches the cards with something approaching tenderness. His peace. His escape.
Take me. Take me down into the dark where there is only the game and my mind goes quiet.

He knows this cannot be. The game is for later. It is his reward. He cannot simply play it whenever he wishes. There are rules, and although he is weary, he knows there are more moves to make, and that in a sense, he is already playing the game, has been for quite some time. He is the dealer and the cards are his pawns. Red to black, black to red, high to low.

Bone to flesh. Flesh to blood.

Something burns deep within him. Beneath the mask his face twitches into a smile. He may never know what true joy is, but there is such pleasure in carnage, such ecstasy in agony.

He closes his eyes and remembers splitting Luke from breastbone to crotch out there in the snow. The body was still warm, the blood steaming. He remembers the sound and horrible stink as he plunged his hands into the open cavity and ripped the intestines free in a mangle of bloody wet cords. How he’d held them up to the snowy dark sky as an offering, how they’d felt as they brushed his face, hot and sticky and slick as they smeared his skin.

His erection grows, tightens his pants. He licks his lips.

Somewhere beyond the dark skies clouds roll, and those memories are replaced with others. Far older and more profound, they play out before his mind’s eye like a film slinking through an old projector.

The sky there…he remembers that most of all because it is so different from the skies here. Neither blue nor black, neither orange nor red, it is a fantastic blend of them all, like a great canvas smeared with several haphazard brushstrokes, the clouds churning and turbulent and alive, rolling over charred and blackened hilltops where his kind, once brethren but now enemy, lie impaled on giant spires of bone protruding from the ground like blasphemous trees. Their bodies dripping blood and bile, arms and legs dangling, broken, limp and useless as their once-magnificent wings.